Wireless communication services have become very popular, and many carriers, content providers, and other service providers endeavor to deliver such services. Users access wireless communication services using a wide variety of devices, such as mobile phones, personal computers, personal digital assistants, personal and personal media devices, as well as other types of devices. Accordingly, users have grown to enjoy the mobility provided by wireless communication services.
In a typical wireless environment, the provisioning and delivery of wireless communication services requires many different elements. In an example, a wireless communication service area can be defined by a radio frequency (RF) pattern generated by RF transmissions from a nearby access system. A wireless base station, sometimes referred to as a base transceiver stations (BTS), is an example of an access system. The access system is often times linked to a service system via a backhaul link, such as a T-1 link, an Ethernet link, or a wireless microwave link. The service system may include several processing elements, such as a base station controller, a mobile switching center (MSC), an access service node (ASN), or a gateway system, as well as other elements. The mobile station establishes a communication path via the access system and the service system to other communication networks to obtain wireless access to communication services, such as voice, video, and data services.
Many challenges exist to the delivery of high quality wireless service experiences. In particular, the growing popularity of high bandwidth applications, such as video downloads and streaming media applications, requires a large amount of bandwidth at each point along a communication path. For instance, the communication networks, service system, and access system, and the communication links between these elements, must have enough bandwidth to satisfy the demands of many customers that desire to access high bandwidth applications.
In one example, a user operating a mobile device may request a video from a web server located on the Internet. The mobile device communicates the request to the web server via an access system, backhaul link, and service system. The web server receives the video request, retrieves the appropriate video, and transfers the video to the mobile device. The video traverses the service system, backhaul link, and access system. Thus, sufficient bandwidth must exist at each point and on each link in the communication path between the web server and the mobile device to ensure a high quality viewing experience by the user. The lack of sufficient bandwidth can result in undesirable effects, such as jitter, lost packets, or delay, as well as other problems.
A lack of bandwidth at many points along a communication path can be addressed by adding equipment or obtaining additional communication links. In many cases, networks are overbuilt to ensure that sufficient bandwidth is always available. However, backhaul links are particularly expensive links along the communication path. Thus, wireless carriers generally utilize backhaul links as efficiently as possible.
Unfortunately, backhaul links can become a bottleneck when delivering wireless communication services to many users served by the same access system. In fact, it is not uncommon for hundreds of users within range of a single access system to attempt to reach the same destination, such as a website, nearly simultaneously. Such a mass even may occur in response to breaking news, new video releases, or the like.
Moreover, present data transfer rates accommodate average per-user throughput of 250 kilobits per second. At any given time, hundreds of users within the coverage area of a single access system may be streaming or downloading content. At the same time, the average backhaul bandwidth is 5 megabits per second, and streaming and downloading services account for the largest share of backhaul usage. Thus, at present backhaul capacity levels, only 20 average users can be adequately accommodated simultaneously. Even as backhaul bandwidth grows, demand for content will also grow, and so it will remain difficult to accommodate a large number of users simultaneously.
For example, several users each operating separate mobile devices may request high bandwidth video from web servers on the Internet. As discussed above, the video requests are communicated from the mobile devices to the web servers via an access system and service system. Each video is then transferred from the web servers to the mobile devices via the service system, backhaul link, and access system, thereby generating many redundant downloads over the serving backhaul link. If the backhaul link does not have sufficient bandwidth available for handling multiple video transfers, the user experience may suffer.